The Dreaming Cat
On In the Light of a Cat
By : Jette Lundbo Levy
The author Niels Brunse has for many years been one of the most industrious and
praiseworthy translators of foreign literature into Danish. It is possible that some of the qualities
which distinguish the main characters in his fiction stem from that activity.
The quietness, which is connected with perseverance, which is again combined
with a sense for entering into mysteries, and a joy in it.
His central characters, both in the earlier novel Ramoth Bezer and in
the new I lyset af en kat (In the Light of a Cat) describe a modern
version of what the Danish author Herman Bang called ‘quiet existences’. They
are not eyecatching, radiant people, but people who have been damaged by life,
are a little suspicious or disillusioned. At the same time they have the
slightly un-modern trait of being decent in their relations with other human
beings and in relation to themselves, and they want to see a coherence and a
form of meaning in their lives. This makes them vulnerable, for they are not
quick movers who can easily go somewhere else. It also means that they have
spiritual energies that can be mustered, flower and show concealed human
connections and patterns of experience. In the two main characters of In the
Light of a Cat these energies are liberated in the attempt to solve the very
ordinary mystery of a husband and father who has suddenly disappeared from his
family for unexplained reasons.
The male journalist and the female photographer who are assigned to the case,
and who subsequently become deeply involved in it, are in the middle of their
course through life. They are in their thirties and life looks rather
impenetrable for them both: they are single with failed love relationships
behind them, they have longings but are also a little reserved and sceptical,
especially the woman, who has suffered a tragic blow of fate in her life.
The strange thing about the man, who has already assimilated so much
of the journalist’s mask that he gets bored and restless when he has free time
on a Sunday, is that he has a cat, a graceful Siamese with glittering blue
eyes, with whose being he closely identifies. This is a cat that dreams in
shifting analogies of time and imagery with intense colours and mythic
dream-thoughts about life energy, darkness and disappearance. Through the cat’s
dignified gestures and intuitive dream pictures of human states of mind, a
powerful layer of imagery is opened up, associated with the Egyptian death and
fertility cult. This layer of sights, dreams and visions with its protecting
and cruel divinities in the form of cats and lions pop up now and then in the
banal everyday drama as dream, hallucination and memory. It is as though it
exists in the little baby, who with her unfathomable eyes and its delicate
fragrance seems to have access to the profound world of the cat. And on the
level of the narrative it is also the newly born child who directly sets in
motion the inner forces that both divide and connect the people in it.
The mystery, which almost becomes an obsession for the journalist, and which
for a long time exercises his imagination and makes him devise all kinds of
hypotheses of various forms of crime, gradually turns out to be a question of
the vanished man’s identity. It has extensive ramifications, to the whole of
the traumatic history of the 20th century and the Second World War.
When the vanished man, after becoming a father, discovers that his origins are
different and more doubtful than he had thought, he seeks a weightlessness and
a lightness that are familiar to him from his erotic life as a musical seducer
of many women, by disappearing and becoming a faceless nobody. But through the
pattern of the narrative, which unfolds as two simultaneous curves in a rising
and falling movement in relation to the difficult question of who one really
is, it turns out that, like his two questing pursuers, he is more closely
related to the world than he had thought.
With its close connection to the cat’s visions, Niels Brunse’s everyday story
possesses energies that contain an ambiguous and generous image of man. At the
same time it has many perspectives of interpretation, for the question of
lightness as opposed to heaviness and pain, the question of becoming grown-up
and moving away from a stable and vaguely youth-like condition are not unique
to the novel’s characters. The novel’s mystery of identity takes place in
Europe and with the cat’s long perspective becomes – at least – a European
mystery.
This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 18
Translated by Translated by David McDuff
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